Introduction

With the increasing integration of technology in people’s lives, fewer people look to books as a source of entertainment. When the COVID pandemic hit, people finally turned back to books after a steady decline in the number of readers that had been lowering since the beginning of the twenty-first century. With everyone stuck at home with not much better to do, both book sales and library checkout numbers saw a massive increase, especially eBooks, considering they’re more portable and accessible; anyone could check out an eBook from the library without even leaving their homes. In the young adult setting, the creation of BookTok brought many readers back to the hobby as well and introducing new readers through this online community.

This report looks over Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse novels and their trends in popularity over the years, as not only is she one of my personal favorite authors, but she is one of the most prominent young adult fantasy authors right now. This report hopes to discover:

This dataset is filtered to only include the seven Grishaverse novels (Shadow and Bone, Siege and Storm, Ruin and Rising, Six of Crows, Crooked Kingdom, King of Scars, and Rule of Wolves).

Summary

From 2017 to 2022, Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse novels have been checked out a total of 20807 times. The majority of people reading these novels choose to check out the ebook format rather than checking out physical books or audiobooks. Shadow and Bone is her most popular novel both historically and presently, and during this time period, it was checked out 5865 times, while her least popular novel, Rule of Wolves, was only checked out 95 times. Her most popular series, the Grisha Trilogy, was checked out the most at a total of 4498 times.

On average, Bardugo’s Grishaverse novels are checked out 3219.452381 times per year, and when this number is split between the seven novels, each Grishaverse novel should be checked out at least 459.9217687 times. We will observe that this will not be the case, as we can infer by Rule of Wolves’s total number of checkouts; Shadow and Bone was checked out 5770 more times than Rule of Wolves during this time frame. On average, Bardugo’s novels are being checked out more in current years, and it seems as thought they will continue to see a steady growth in popularity.

The Dataset

Seattle Public Library collects their monthly checkout data and publishes it for the public. Some of the parameters in this data set include: title, publication date, checkout month and year, genre, creator, material type, and number of checkouts among other examples. The data is generated from a variety of sources, including: Overdrive, hoopla, Freegal, and RBDigital which provide electronic data for digital items while physical item checkout data was sourced from the Lebgrady artwork data archives from April 2005 to September 2016. Currently, physical item checkout data is collected from the Horizon ILS. This data set essentially acts as a monthly record of library checkouts, holding hundreds of thousands of checkouts over the years. In a sense, it acts as a marker of history from 2005 until the present.

At first glance, this data set is quite messy; certain parameters are formatted strangely, such as Publication Year which has around seven different potential formats that each mean different things. Many of the same books are referenced under different titles depending on the different material type. In addition, other fields have such a wide variety of different answers that it may be difficult to find trends that don’t occur over such a vast margin, such as when sorting by subjects. There are gaps in the data here and there and plenty of NA values, and given the size of the data set, there is quite a lot to sort through.

There are certain variables that would’ve been useful to track alongside what has already been collected. For example, we may be able to draw conclusions about a book’s quality or success based on the number of checkouts, but there isn’t any other statistic provided that may strengthen those assumptions such as an average rating from Goodreads or something along those lines. We have no way of knowing the demographics of the people who are checking out items, as all that is tracked is information about the items themselves, so we cannot draw any conclusions about people or culture in relation to checkouts without making inferences. Ultimately, this data set is just about library checkout data, so its scope only exists within that range.

Third Chart

This pie chart displays the total number of checkouts for the Grishaverse novels as divided by respective novel. Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse novels were checked out a total of 20807 times between 2017 and 2022. Shadow and Bone remains the most commonly checked out Grishaverse novel, while Rule of Wolves, which was released in March of 2021, is by far the least popular, with only 95 total checkouts by the end of 2022. Six of Crows doesn’t trail too far behind Shadow and Bone, and both novels make up the majority of total checkouts. It’s difficult to determine a pattern between the different novels, since while Shadow and Bone and Six of Crows are both the first novels in their series, King of Scars is one of the less popular Grishaverse novels to check out. This could be because it’s the first novel of the third series or because it was published more recently.